The Knesset’s Law, Constitution, and Justice committee has approved a bill that would leave those accused of crimes but never prosecuted with no criminal background. The bill, proposed by MK Gilad Erdan (Likud), now faces a Knesset vote.
The bill would allow anyone accused of a crime to request that the case be erased from his or her criminal record as soon as the case is closed due to lack of evidence. Currently, those whose cases are closed are forced to wait years to clean their criminal records. Erdan expressed hope that the bill, if passed into law, would “erase the ‘Mark of Cain’ left on the foreheads of hundreds of thousands of citizens, who were never judged for the accusations brought against them many years ago.”